Nathan Jardine

Monday, July 24, 2017 12:07 GMT

Nathan Jardine writes leaders for The Information Daily and Council News Monitor. After a lifetime in Fleet Street he now divides his time between homes in France and the north-west of England. He enjoys drinking, eating, sleeping and poking fun. His autobiography A Dog's Life is unaccountably out of print.

Driverless cars set for public road debut in Copenhagen within the next year

SHARE

BMW collaborator, Arriva, announces that it has ten driverless vehicles and are planning a trial with the intention of establishing them on Denmark's roads.

DriveNow, a transport company coming out of BMW and Arriva's collaborative effort, has 400 electric cars in Copenhagen, ten of which are driverless.

Head of Arriva's DriveNow operations and mobility service manager, Morten Jakobsen, told newspaper Jyllands-Posten, “We expect to be underway with a trial of the first automated cars within the next 5-6 months". The first trial of driverless cars will operate around a hospital in Copenhagen, collecting a cusomer from the hospital and then parking itself.

Ole birk Olsen, the Danish Minister for Transport, told Jyllands-Posten “[Companies] must apply for permission, and provided safety...document[ation]" but "there are almost no limits to what can be applied for”.

The implementation of driverless cars are still laden with concerns regarding safety, such as the reaction of automated vehicles to complex situations on the roads. However, Per Homann Jesperson, a traffice researcher at Roskilde Univeristy commented in Jyllands-Posten, “In a few years we will probably say that it is dangerous to let people drive cars and have special lanes for vehicles with people behind the wheel”.